Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Communications Biology is a Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature) journal, and its JIF is computed and reported entirely independently of the JIF for Nature Communications — a similarly named but editorially and commercially distinct sister title within the same publisher family.

What the number actually measures

The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given year to a journal’s citable items (articles and reviews) published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. Communications Biology (ISSN 2399-3642) launched in 2018 as a fully open-access, broad-scope biology journal published under the Nature Portfolio umbrella, and it is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded, receiving its own JIF on that basis — the same mechanical calculation applied to every JCR-indexed title.

A note on the current figure

Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report Communications Biology’s 2-year JIF at approximately 5.1 for the 2024 JCR data year (2025 release) and approximately 5.8 for the 2025 JCR data year (2026 release, issued June 2026), placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1 within its category. Nature Portfolio’s own journal-impact page (nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact) sits behind an account-gated redirect and jcr.clarivate.com is subscription-gated, so CASRAI could not independently confirm one authoritative figure against either source at the time of writing. Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release — Clarivate updates JCR every June — and check the journal’s own metrics page or jcr.clarivate.com directly for the current, authoritative figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file.

Worked example

If Communications Biology published 2,000 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received 10,200 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 10,200 / 2,000 = 5.1 — the same arithmetic Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal, from a small society title to a large open-access journal like this one. What differs is the citation and publication volume feeding the ratio, not the formula itself.

Communications Biology vs. Nature Communications: not the same journal, not the same figure

Communications Biology and Nature Communications are both published under the Nature Portfolio umbrella and both carry “Communications” in the name, but they are editorially and commercially distinct journals with separately computed JIFs that should never be used interchangeably. Nature Communications is the older (2010-launched), broader multidisciplinary flagship with a reported 2-year JIF around 15.7 for the 2024 JCR data year. Communications Biology is a newer (2018-launched) sister title scoped specifically to biology, with a reported JIF roughly a third of that figure. Citing one journal’s figure while referring to the other by name is a sourcing error worth double-checking before it goes into a CV or grant narrative — always confirm which specific Nature Portfolio title’s JCR entry you are quoting.

Why this number alone is a poor stand-in for quality

Citation-tracking organizations including DORA, the CoARA coalition, and Clarivate itself caution against over-relying on a single journal-level metric to judge an individual article or researcher. A journal’s JIF is heavily shaped by a small number of highly cited papers and by field-level citation norms, so the same score means different things depending on what is being compared. DORA’s core recommendation is not to eliminate the JIF, but to stop treating it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or the merit of an individual researcher’s work — a distinction that matters when Communications Biology’s JIF gets cited in tenure, promotion, or grant-review contexts as if it described any one article published there, rather than the journal’s two-year citation average as a whole.

Counter-example

Communications Biology’s CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader document set) is not the same figure as its Clarivate JIF, and reporting one as if it were the other is a common sourcing error. Similarly, an individual highly cited article published in Communications Biology does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level, which is precisely the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
• Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the similarly named sister journal most often confused with this one; not interchangeable with Communications Biology’s own figure.
• Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance within the same publisher family.
• Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another Nature Portfolio open-access title’s illustrative instance of the same metric.
• Science Advances’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
• PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another broad-scope open-access megajournal’s illustrative instance.
• CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
• DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.